Erased

Abandonment, life, death, and, oddly, Cleveland are explored in the hilarious second installment of Jim Krusoe's trilogy about resurrection.

In Erased, Krusoe takes on a dead mother who mysteriously sends notes from the beyond to her grown son, Theodore, the owner of a mail-order gardening-implement business. "I need to see you," the first card reads. Theodore does what any sensible person would: he ignores it. But when he gets a second card that's even more urgent, Theodore leaves his quiet home in St. Nils for a radiantly imagined Cleveland, Ohio, to track down his mother. There, aided by Uleene, the last remaining member of Satan's Samaritans, an all-girl biker club, he searches through the realms of women's clubs, art, rodent extermination, and sport fishing until he finds the answers he seeks.

Jim Krusoe is the author of the novels Girl Factory (Tin House Books) andIceland; two collections of stories, Blood Lake and Abductions; as well as five books of poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund. He teaches at Santa Monica College and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and children.

“Smart and funny...Krusoe is an engaging writer and an acute observer of his own brand of quotidian strangeness...Krusoe's witty book, for all its drifting in the slipstream of realistic narrative, ends up being, in the old and honest and satisfying sense, familiar.”—John Haskell, The New York Times Book Review

"...this novel has the power to draw us into its bizarre world...Krusoe reminds us that the best prescription for bereavement might just be a healthy dose of action. That better place is just around the next corner."—George Ducker, The Los Angeles Times

"Erased tells the not unlikely story—not in Jim Krusoe’s funny, absurdist fiction—of a man who receives a post card from his dead mother, inviting him to Cleveland, Ohio, where he finds mystery in a kind of simultaneous civic dreamland and nightmare, and also discovers social organizations that seem only to assure the hopelessness and nutty redemption of a fictional world that echoes Kafka and Barthelme, except even funnier." —Andrew Tonkovich, Bibliocracy Radio

"This novel, by Jim Krusoe, from the consistently interesting Tin House Books, purports to explore 'women's clubs, art, rodent extermination, and sport fishing.' I've no idea how this detail from a famous Bosch painting connects, but it sure is charming."—The Book Bench, The New Yorker Blog

"The pace of the book resembles a dream: It starts slowly, carefully accumulating details, and then rushes at the end...Erased raises more questions than it answers, but it offers some very entertaining speculation along the way."—Elliott Holt, TheRumpus.net

"Erased develops the quirky environs of Krusoe's America with its existential inconsistencies while injecting some human feeling and warm humor into the proceedings."—Sharon Fulton, Open Letters Monthly

"Krusoe is very, very funny, but thoughtful as well in Erased."—Paul Ingram, Prairie Lights

It was late at night and she said she couldn't get to sleep. This was unusual because I had never heard my mother say that she had trouble sleeping. Once she even told me she slept like a tree. "You know, Theodore, some people say that trees don't sleep, but they do. You go out yourself some time late at night to a place where it's really dark, and you watch them. You'll see. Don't argue."

"But Mother," I said, "I'm not arguing. I'm agreeing. I can go out right now and check it you want me to." "Don't be silly, Theodore," she said. "It's the concept I'm discussing here. And besides, if just by any chance something happened to you while you were out there I'd feel responsible. Sometimes I think I never should have left you."

My mother was a transcriber; that's what she did for a living, week in and week out. This was all a part of her routine: Once or twice a week she would take the bus downtown to the transcription office and put the tapes she was finished with, together with the computer disks she'd transcribed them on, into a medium-sized cardboard box marked "Incoming" which the transcription service kept by one side of the front door. "No Internet for them," she said with satisfaction, though no doubt that's changed by now.

Next, she said, she poured herself a cup of coffee as usual from the pot in the corner of the transcription office, put her purse down on the table, flopped into a chair, and hung around for a few minutes to talk with Angela. Angela basically ran the place, and sometimes, if Angela was too busy to talk she would point to the phone she had pressed against her ear with her shoulder, wave good-bye and mouth the words "next time." She did that once when I was there. Then my mother would pick up a new package of tapes from the box marked "Outgoing" from the opposite side of the door, get back on the bus and bring them home to her apartment. "It's a real grab bag," she used say. "Sometimes you get great ones that are easy to understand and fast to finish; at others you get some real stinkers." Angela was fair, of course, but a person didn't want to get on her bad side, either.

The same day my mother had called me she said she'd brought the new tapes home, and as usual inserted the first untranscribed tape in her foot-pedal-activated, variable-speed tape player, and put on her headphones. Then she'd listened, typing what was said and who said it into her computer. After she finished the tape, she checked it on the screen for spelling and copied it to a disk. She said she'd done a couple that day, and I knew that eventually, when the whole batch was completed, in about a week, she'd get back on the bus, drop the tapes, each in a separate envelope together with its disk into the "Incoming" box, and hear another installment in the story of Angela's tragic life. Angela had a boyfriend who was a real horse's ass, my mother said, but Angela couldn't seem to shake him. "I told her he reminds me of your father," my mother said, "but that didn't seem to help."

You can see why I may not have been paying as much attention to the whole conversation as I should have been.

The tapes themselves were of lectures or interviews, usually radio shows, and needed to be transcribed not so much because they were especially interesting or because they were going to be printed anytime soon in a book or magazine, but the transcripts had to be made for legal reasons in case, as sometimes happened, the originals got lost or needed to be examined quickly. "In other words," my mother used to say, "we're not talking high drama here, Theodore, only small claims court." So instead of great historical interviews, the tapes my mother copied were mostly the voices of supposed experts droning on, with sometimes a semi-famous personality thrown in. These latter she would name with a note of pride in her voice, but mostly she limited her communication about content to the odd fact she found interesting.

That night, for example, my mother told me she'd just finished transcribing an interview with a well-known scientist who claimed that mankind was destroying about eighty species of animals and plants and insects every single day—or maybe that was only the number for animals—I was just half-listening because I was in bed by then, and as I said, was tired. There was a catch, or something, in her voice and then she said, "Erased, just like that. As if they'd never been alive at all."

"Are you all right?" I asked, because I thought I heard a different tone than I was used to.

She told me she was fine, though yes, she was feeling distressed at that moment, and I imagined her sitting in the apartment where she said she preferred to live instead of moving in with me (thank goodness). "Is everything OK with your apartment and your neighbors?" I asked.

I should add here that a part of me felt guilty in a way because the neighborhood she lived in wasn't the best. It consisted of a few light industrial types of shops, places that bent metal or fabricated plastic, and was home to a few marginal businesses, like the Treasure Chest, the store she lived above. But on the other hand my mother was tough, and I hadn't asked her to pack up her belongings and come out to St. Nils to be with me. After all until recently, she'd spent her whole life not caring anything about where her only son lived or what was happening to him. So why, I wondered, should I feel so guilty? I did, though.

That night on her end of the phone every couple of minutes I could hear a car door slam. It was the sound—I knew from having watched—of some guy pulling up to the Treasure Chest, and running inside. Then after a short while, the car door would slam again and the invisible door-slammer would drive off, carrying some box, some bag, some apparatus or another. I say "guy" because about ninety-nine out of a hundred customers of the Treasure Chest were men.

Then my mother's voice was back with a kind of strange quiver to it. "But Theodore, if you're interested, I'll tell you. A really odd thing did happen today," she said. "Though it's probably nothing."

For the first time I sat up a little in bed. "Go ahead. I'm listening."

I pictured her at that hour. She would be lying in her own bed, holding the phone with her left hand, and talking. Her window would be open because she liked to sleep that way, and she was probably dressed in one of the white cotton nightgowns she favored; maybe she was even still in her bathrobe. As my mother talked, she would be looking at her right hand with its transcriber's fingers and short nails that she liked to cover with clear polish. It was a small thing, but I knew that she really enjoyed admiring them. Her hands and nails were one of the few places where I could measure her vanity. They were practical hands, not showy, but well shaped and smooth. She took good care of them. The rest of her, as I said, was sturdy and no nonsense.

My mother continued softly, as if at that very moment she herself was transcribing what had just happened earlier that day, or maybe speaking it into an invisible microphone for another, imaginary transcriber to take down. "I had just gotten up from my desk—my ‘work station' you know I like to call it—and walked over to the window to look down at the street below." Again, for a second I thought I could hear something entirely different in her voice. Was it fear? I pushed the thought away. But honestly, a part of me just wanted to stop talking and to sleep.

"Remember this was only five or six hours ago," she told me. "It was evening and was still light, though naturally it was growing darker every minute, and while some people were coming home from work, others were heading out for what I suppose they call pleasure these days: maybe dinner and a movie and a little dancing—who knows, Theodore—it's been a long time since I've done that myself."

I made a note that I should probably take her out to dinner one of these days. Then out of nowhere, I started to feel really sad, as if I'd lost something I'd never see again, but couldn't say what it was. It wasn't the first time I'd felt like this, and knew if I waited it would go away. I turned the TV on, with a picture but no sound, because that usually seemed to help. It showed a hockey game, men darting like angry wasps.

My mother continued, "So there they were that evening—all those lovers hurrying to bed, those clerks hurrying home to their families, and those businessmen going who-knows-where, with that funny look people get when counting their money still plastered to their faces. I don't know the exact time, but it was still early enough for a few kids to be out on those horrible skateboards. I don't know why more of them aren't killed on them."

Skateboards were a sore point with my mother, and I, of course, was born too long ago ever to have grown up with one. Since when—I asked her in my mind—were you so interested in children?

I flipped the channel to a pantomime wrestling match with two guys in sequins and my mother grew silent. When she spoke again her voice was more different still, and heavier. "So I was just looking out the window," she said, "but then out in the street a man stopped and looked at me. He was wearing a heavy, brown overcoat and carrying a dark leather bag. It wasn't exactly a briefcase," she added, "because it was lumpier and looked as if it had been designed to hold groceries, and he didn't look like a businessman. Then this man, Theodore, walked right up under my window, but instead of checking out what's in the window of the Treasure Chest, as most of people do, or avoiding it, this man stopped dead in his tracks. Then he raised his head, and stared right at me, as if he knew me from somewhere."

"Maybe he did," I said. "Did he threaten you or harass you in any way? Do you think he could have been a stalker? I just hope you got a good description of him and wrote it down, just in case. Maybe it's time for you to think about moving to a better neighborhood." I wished I hadn't said that part but it was too late to take it back.

There was a silence as if she were thinking. Then she went on again, in that same weird voice, almost as if she'd been hypnotized, something I found it hard to believe anyone could do to my mother. "Are you asking what he looked like, Theodore? I only wish I could say. But the fact is that right now, when I try to picture him, I can only remember that brown overcoat. And the bag. I'm sorry."

I waited for her to continue. This was a new voice. I had never heard her apologize for anything.

"I must have nodded or something," she told me, "because his voice became quieter, but at the same time—and I don't know how this is possible, Theodore—I could hear it even better. Then he said, ‘You, Helen, who are looking down on me and all of us at this moment, thinking your thoughts, copying the words of others, has it ever occurred to you that you might not even be alive?'"

"What?" I said. "How would he know that you're a transcriber if he hadn't met you before?"

My mother said nothing. Surely, I thought, it must have been someone she knew, had talked to and then forgotten about, who was playing a bad joke. Except for Angela, though, and Ramon, who worked downstairs in the Treasure Chest, she never spoke of knowing anyone.

And I was about to mention this when she resumed. "Then the stranger's voice got even quieter. He said, ‘Yes, Helen, I mean you. And despite your having a steady occupation as a transcriber, and having a strong pulse and steady heartbeat, has it ever occurred to you for even one single moment, that you might be dead, because not only for the living but also for the dead anything is possible? And if that sounds strange,' he said, ‘why don't you think about it: Are you able to tell me right now what actual difference would there be between you being here and alive this very second, and if you weren't, but only thought you were? Answer that if you can with all the so-called wisdom you have culled from years of transcribing interviews, Helen Bellefontaine, and you truly will have hit the jackpot.'"

"He really said that? ‘Wisdom culled from years.'"

"Can you imagine?" my mother said. "Of course he did. Do you think that being a transcriber I would have forgotten a speech that? I even wrote it down afterwards because it was creepy."

It sounded like she was moving back to her old self then, so I felt a little better. "What did you answer?" I asked.

"I said nothing, of course. What can anyone say to something like that? I was afraid to say anything."

Then, my mother said, the stranger—whose hair she suddenly remembered might have been a medium brown—simply turned, walked around the corner, and disappeared. And it was only afterwards, she told me, when she was still at the open window, looking out over where he'd been, that it wasn't the kind of weather at all for such a heavy overcoat; it was much too warm, and whatever might have been in his bag couldn't have been groceries because after he had left she noticed there was a dark, moist spot on the pavement right where he'd been standing.

"Maybe," my mother said to me in an uncharacteristically tentative voice, "he was carrying a block of ice to a party."

I turned off the television and looked at the phone, which seemed to have grown heavy and impossibly cold in my hand. I imagined her sitting there on the edge of her bed—or maybe she'd gotten up and moved to a chair—and now was holding her neat transcriber's hands out in front of her to make sure they were real. "But that's crazy," I repeated.

I could hear my mother take a breath. "That's what I just said, Theodore, and you have to realize I was in shock. Honestly, it felt as though the man had struck me. I was sure I was alive, of course, but I started thinking: how exactly could such a thing be proven? I know, I could go to a doctor, of course," she said, "and the stranger even mentioned my seeing one. So, I suppose that tomorrow morning I did just that. I got on the phone and made an appointment, and then in month or two, when I finally get to see one" (my mother had no health insurance plan, and something as simple as seeing a doctor was not so easy) "the doctor will tell me nothing's wrong and that I should take a vacation." She gave a laugh. "As if I can afford a vacation. And anyway I can't stop remembering how the stranger hinted that there was something about the dead, or at least about some of them, that had the ability to fool doctors."

So much for falling asleep, I thought. "Excuse me for asking, but are you taking any new medication or anything like that?"

"No," my mother said, "but you tell me this please, and I'm not kidding: You know how in the past sometimes people used to be buried alive, and how it still happens now once in a while, though mostly in poorer countries. Then why can't the reverse also be true? Why can't someone who is actually dead be walking around right now? And if that person happens to be me, and a doctor really was able to confirm this, to sit me down and say, ‘Yes Helen, as a matter of fact you are dead. That stranger who spoke to you in front of your apartment a month or so ago was absolutely correct,' would I really want to know?

"Would you?" she asked.

I told her that was a good question.

"So, here's the thing, Ted," she continued, her voice continuing back to its old self. " I know I'm still the same person I was before the man called out to me. I know I'm fine—you don't have to worry—but there was something him and about the fact he knew exactly where I lived and what I did and my name too. I guess that's why I called you."

Then my mother made one of those laughs people use to show that everything's OK. "So what do you think, Theodore? Am I alive, or am I like some device, say, an old fishfinder that a person keeps under the seat of his boat even though they have a new one that's much better in every way just in case they may be out on the middle of the lake one day and the new one breaks down, or they need an extra part that they can borrow from the old one?"

"A fishfinder?" I said.

"You know," my mother answered. "Like radar, for finding fish."

But even as I thought about what, if anything, I should do, my mother's voice changed again, this time into a one-of-the-guys tone she seemed to be able to produce at will. "Hang on for a minute, Theodore," she said. "Your mom is going get up and pour herself a nice stiff glass of beer."

The phone clunked as she set it on the table by her bed. It was true—my mother liked her beer. I pictured her getting up, wearing her red slippers, picking up the portable phone again and taking a few strong strides into the kitchen toward her refrigerator. Essentially, my mother's apartment consisted of three rooms: a living room, where she slept, a white-tiled bathroom, and toward the back, the kitchen with its small light blue table that caught the morning sun. The kitchen was where she usually ate her meals, and I knew at that very moment that kitchen table would be changing from blue to purple beneath the flashing neon sign of the Treasure Chest, which liked to advertise itself, in smaller red letters crammed beneath the large ones, as "Your Family Center for Adult Entertainment." The Treasure Chest wasn't as large as a person would think a center for anything would be. But it was safe, because as my mother said, "The real sickos don't spent good money on this stuff, don't you worry."

Then she was back on the line again. "There," she said. "I can feel my pulse. Pulses don't lie, do they?"

I told her I didn't think they did, and there was more silence as she took another gulp (my mother wasn't someone who sipped her beer).

I didn't know what else to say or do. I thought maybe if we stayed on the phone like that—her drinking beer, me listening—quiet long enough, everything would rewind to where it had been before the stranger had called out. The recent past would be removed, and my mother would go back to being the exact same person she'd been earlier, back to when she was transcribing—indisputably alive, not special, not a saint, that was for sure, but back to being my mother, whoever that was—and I could get to bed and go on with my life, as I had all those years without her. "Do you want me to come over for a while and stay with you?" I asked.

I got out of my own bed and walked to my own window. There was another long silence on the phone. The road outside my apartment was dark, and there weren't any cars going by. The streetlamps across from me had burned out weeks ago and the city still hadn't gotten around to fixing them.

My mother spoke. "Well, I think that beer has made me feel a lot better. You can always count on a beer. I'm fine now, Theodore. I know you have a successful business to run and all that. I'm going to try to get some sleep and you should, too. So good night," she said. "I'll see you around. Thanks for listening to the worries of an old woman, even if she is your mother."

Do the dead sleep? Who can say? I imagined my mother lying there. Against her cheek would be her usual pink sheets, probably scratchy because wasn't one for doing laundry, and no doubt she would be feeling the weight of her green wool blanket, as heavy as the dirt that covered a grave. She would watch the Treasure Chest's red strobe as it announced its location like a lighthouse in a choppy sea for anyone who needed the comfort of adult entertainment, or maybe, come to think of it, to warn lost sailors of rocks and danger. And then, thanks to the beer, she would begin to doze off, and at last she would be gone.

But I believe that was the first time I ever heard my mother call herself old.

Q. Erased is the second novel in a trilogy linked not by plot or character but by theme. Did you set out to write a trilogy? If so, why? If not, how did that evolve? How do you know you’ll be finished with these themes when the third novel is finished?

A. I learned I was writing a trilogy somewhere between the second and third novels. My mother died while I was writing the first one, Girl Factory. I was also at the time working on Erased and had begun the third, and I thought her death hadn’t affected me all that much. Then one night I was lying in bed and sat straight up. I realized that all three novels were about the same subject: how to bring back the dead. I was shocked I hadn’t realized this sooner, and I know it’s a trilogy because in the last of the three, called Towards You, I actually succeed.

Q. The narrator of Erased lives in an imagined town called St. Nils, but during the narrative he travels to Cleveland, Ohio, a real place. Why did you choose to move him from an imagined place to a real one? Why not two imagined places, or two real ones?

A. All my characters seem to inhabit St. Nils at one time or another during their lives, so that part came easily. I stick them there because I’m not a naturalistic writer, and it’s helpful for me to use an unincorporated (so to speak) place setting. I did grow up in Cleveland, however, and left it when I went to college, so the Cleveland in Erased is as imaginary, in its way, as St. Nils, but there is also a note or two of truth: On the one hand, the years I spent in Ohio were the unhappiest of my life, but on the other, I think that for most people, including me, the place where they grow up becomes, when recollected, a kind of Eden, a magic world, because everything happens for the first time. Everything is fresh. Everything makes an impression. Somehow these two conflicting versions of Cleveland have merged inside this novel.

Q. What idea/image provided the genesis for Erased? Did that idea/image make it into the final version?

A. The actual scene that began this novel about seven years ago was of a bunch of guys around a campfire in Mongolia (I’m not kidding). The book’s subject was supposed to be Beauty, as personified by a bone fragment of Helen of Troy. So I ran at it four or five times and realized it kept wanting to be an Indiana Jones story, which I wasn’t interested in writing. Then the main character turned into a French paleo-archeologist in Los Angeles, and I tried that out for a few more versions. Then he became a teenage taxidermist, and I spent a happy six months researching taxidermy. Finally, after about a dozen runs at it of sixty pages each, I had the teen animal-stuffer stare out the window of his room (above a garage) down onto the street below. Something struck me about that moment; it had a promise and an openness I hadn’t found earlier. So I changed the boy to a woman staring out a window, and was on my way for real. For a while, the main character was a woman searching for her son, but eventually the narrative settled into a son looking for his mother, and that’s how it stayed. The only faint trace of that very first scene around the campfire is the mother’s name, Helen.

Q. In an essay called “Le Mot Incorrect” (to be published in The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House), you open with a phone conversation between you and a friend in which the friend informs you that you often use what might be considered the “incorrect” word. Can you give an example of that happening in Erased?

A. I think the wrong word and the wrong idea are really helpful to my writing. I would never have started writing if I had to wait for the correct place to start. What is useful to me as a writer isn’t correctness, or even knowing what I’m doing, only to find something that interests me and is worth exploring—something that allows me to write. Specifically, the wrong word often can lead a person off into a more interesting direction than the right one can. I think of the long poem, Ko, by Kenneth Koch, where the need to rhyme (a great generator of wrong words) is used to careen the narrative into places it would never sanely go. Trying to think of a name for a women’s club in Erased, a Christmas tree popped into mind (it was around Christmas at the time). What the hell, I said, I’ll call it the Christmas Tree Club, and where that took me was a real surprise. So I tell myself not to be afraid. The best ideas, and probably the worst, too, are by accident.

Q. The climactic scene in Erased happens in a bowling alley. Do you bowl?

A. The only time I have ever bowled was in Cleveland when I was a member of a teen bowling league. I was a miserable bowler, but loved the vibrating ambiance of the bowling alley, the smells, the lights, and the somnambulistic quality of the sport, where mostly you doze, then every now and again wake up long enough to roll a ball or two down the alley. After that you return to sleeping, or at least a nap. It’s deeply satisfying.

Q. Much of the narrator’s time in Cleveland is spent going to women’s social clubs to look for his mother. How did you research women’s social clubs? Do you belong to any social clubs?

A. I did no research at all on women’s clubs, but my mother was one of five daughters, and each one of my aunts was a strong woman, so in a way, as a child, I felt as if I was living in the middle of a women’s club. There are three such clubs in Erased, but for several drafts of the novel I had four of them, one for each of my aunts. And then, of course, there is the narrator’s mother, Helen, who rounds things out to the exact number of women who raised me. Needless to say, none of this was thought through in the least.

Q. What are you reading that you would recommend?

A. I am a huge fan of War and War, by the Hungarian writer, Laszlo Krasznahorkai. It is sincere, crazy, scary, hallucinated, and sweet, all at once. I’m also still carrying around the taste of Bolano’s 2666. At this exact moment I am finishing the second of two cheesy-but-fun early novels of David Markson,Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Dead Beat. I’m also a fan of his later books, but the ones I refer to were written, I’m guessing, back when he must have been trying to support himself with genre work, and are archly noirish private-eye thrillers. I continue to read, out loud to my son at bedtime, the Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote, as much for my benefit as for his.

Q. Has working on this trilogy helped you to come to any conclusions about dying and the afterlife?